At the railway-station we spent more than a weary hour, waiting for the train, which at last came up, and took us to Mauchline.  We got into an omnibus, the only conveyance to be had, and drove about a mile to the village, where we established ourselves at the Loudoun Hotel, one of the veriest country-inns which we have found in Great Britain.  The town of Mauchline, a place more redolent of Burns than almost any other, consists of a street or two of contiguous cottages, mostly white-washed, and with thatched roofs.  It has nothing sylvan or rural in the immediate village, and is as ugly a place as mortal man could contrive to make, or to render uglier through a succession of untidy generations.  The fashion of paving the village-street, and patching one shabby house on the gable-end of another, quite shuts out all verdure and pleasantness; but, I presume, we are not likely to see a more genuine old Scotch village, such as they used to be in Burns’s time, and long before, than this of Mauchline.  The church stands about midway up the street, and is built of red freestone, very simple in its architecture, with a square tower and pinnacles.  In this sacred edifice, and its churchyard, was the scene of one of Burns’s most characteristic productions,—­“The Holy Fair.”

Almost directly opposite its gate, across the village-street, stands Posie Nansie’s inn, where the “Jolly Beggars” congregated.  The latter is a two-story, redstone, thatched house, looking old, but by no means venerable, like a drunken patriarch.  It has small, old-fashioned windows, and may well have stood for centuries,—­though, seventy or eighty years ago, when Burns was conversant with it, I should fancy it might have been something better than a beggars’ alehouse.  The whole town of Mauchline looks rusty and time-worn,—­even the newer houses, of which there are several, being shadowed and darkened by the general aspect of the place.  When we arrived, all the wretched little dwellings seemed to have belched forth their inhabitants into the warm summer evening; everybody was chatting with everybody, on the most familiar terms; the bare-legged children gambolled or quarrelled uproariously, and came freely, moreover, and looked into the window of our parlor.  When we ventured out, we were followed by the gaze of the whole town:  people standing in their door-ways, old women popping their heads from the chamber-windows, and stalwart men—­idle on Saturday at e’en, after their week’s hard labor—­clustering at the street-corners, merely to stare at our unpretending selves.  Except in some remote little town of Italy, (where, besides, the inhabitants had the intelligible stimulus of beggary,) I have never been honored with nearly such an amount of public notice.